The queen honey bee is known to mate with multiple drones, and can produce over a million offspring in its lifetime. Its presence is vital to the growth and survival of a beehive. This reference book is a detailed guide to queen honey bees. The book starts by providing deep insights into the fascinating biologyof the queen honey bees, their morphometric features, developmental synchronicity, genetics, hormones, pheromones, colonial organization and swarming. Further, the book describes artificial queen rearing techniques that facilitate healthy bee colony growth and increase apiculture productivity. The book equips readers with all the knowledge they need to know about queen bee development, their role in the colony and improving the health of their colony. Key Features- 14 reader-friendly chapters that comprehensively present information about queen honey bees- Comprehensive coverage about queen bee biology, including their physical morphology, genetics, proteomics, development and behavior (including worker and drone interactions)- Information about the role of queen bees in colonial organization and life-cycle events- Practical information that helps to improve bee colony health for research and apiculture (disease mechanisms and control, artificial breeding) The book is an essential primary reference on queen honey bees for biology and entomology students, academicians and researchers at all educational levels. Apiculturists, bee keeping enthusiasts, and general readers interested in honey bees can also benefit from the breadth of information presented.

This reference book is the definitive guide to drone honey bees. The book equips readers with all the knowledge they need to know about drone bee biology and development, their role in the colony and improving the health of their colony. The book starts by providing a detailed review of the development of drone honey bees, their biology, morphometric features, interaction with the Queen and the haploid parthenogenesis. The book then delves into the pheromone profile and mating behavior of drones.

The impact of bees on our world is immeasurable. Bees are responsible for the evolution of the vast array of brightly colored flowers and for engineering the niches of multitudes of plants, animals, and microbes. They've painted our landscapes with flowers through their pollination activities, and they have evolved the most complex societies to aid their exploitation of the environment. The parallels between human and insect societies have been explored by countless sociobiologists. Traditional texts present stratified layers of knowledge where the reader excavates levels of biological organization, each building on the last. In this book, Robert E. Page, Jr., delves deep into the evolutionary history and the sociality of bees. He presents fundamental biology-not in layers, but wrapped around interesting themes and concepts, and in ways designed to explore and understand each concept. Page uses the social contract as a way to examine the complex social system of bee societies, a contract that has been written over millions of years of social evolution on the fabric of DNA. The book examines the coevolution of bees and flowering plants, bees as engineers of the environment, the evolution of sociality, the honey bee as a superorganism and how it evolves, and the mating behavior of the queen. The resulting book explores the ways human societies and bee colonies are similar-not from a common ancestry with shared genes for sociality, but from shared fundamentals of political philosophy.

Apis mellifera L., the European honey bee, is a social insect that is vital to managed pollination services in the United States. Honey bee health and colony survival are challenged by the novel parasite Varroa destructor (Anderson & Trueman 2000). Honey bee queens are naturally polyandrous, mating with an average of 12 males. Hyper-polyandrous queens, created via artificial insemination, have shown increased resistance to Varroa mites. This project combined a hyper-polyandry treatment with a genetic treatment of bees selected for Varroa Sensitive Hygienic (VSH) trait, an additive rare resistance trait. The combination of these two intrinsic forms of resistance resulted in colonies with lower Varroa mite levels and these findings offer support to the rare-allele hypothesis for the evolution of extreme polyandry in honey bees. Additionally, an applied field method was evaluated to simulate the benefits of hyper-polyandry via brood mixing: the manual sharing of immature bees between a set of colonies to increase genetic diversity without artificial insemination. Brood mixing did not have a significant effect on any measure of colony strength and the lack of similar results to relevant tests of hyper-polyandry in the United Kingdom may be due to the homogeneous genetic structure of the United States honey bee population and indicates a lack of heterogeneous genetics when sourcing queen stock from individual honey bee queen breeders.